Tag: TV

December 31, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story”

Directed by Skye Borgman

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” features an all-white group of people talking about the child-abuse scandal involving former YouTube family influencer Ruby Franke and her business partner Jodi Hildebrant, who are both from Utah.

Culture Clash: In December 2023, Franke and Hildebrandt were both convicted of felony child abuse for beating, torturing, starving, and holding captive Franke’s two youngest children earlier that year.

Culture Audience: “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching true crime documentaries about child abusers who are punished for their crimes and how cult-like leaders can cause damage.

“Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” is a very lazy and sloppily edited documentary that re-uses the same footage and recycles the same information that’s in other documentaries about the Jodi Hildebrandt/Ruby Franke child abuse scandal. This documentary’s timeline jumps all over the place. And there are some weird editing choices. For example, toward the end of the documentary, a closeup of an unidentified person’s eye is shown multiple times, for no apparent reason.

Directed by Skye Borgman, “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” should have uncovered more information about Hildebrandt’s murky personal background. Instead, the documentary repeats basic information that is already publicly known: Hildebrandt (who was born in 1969) is a divorced mother who is estranged from her family, but she was able to amass a small fortune by marketing herself as a therapist/life coach for families, particularly families headed by married couples. Through a Mormon-centered counseling company she founded called ConneXions, Hildebrandt (who lived in Ivins, Utah) became a cult-like leader who destroyed many marriages instead of saving them, according to people who’ve given interviews about Hildebrandt in this documentary and elsewhere.

Hildebrandt and people from the Franke family are not interviewed in this documentary, although the documentary includes archival footage (mostly police body cam footage and social media footage) that have been also used in several other documentaries about this scandal. The documentary also includes widely reported phone calls that Hildebrandt and Franke made while incarcerated. In these phone calls, Hildebrandt and Franke express no remorse for their crimes and describe themselves as persecuted victims. In one of the phone calls, Hildebrandt blames one of her victims for inflicting torture wounds on himself.

One of the marriages that was negatively affected by Hildebrandt’s interference was the marriage of Ruby Franke and Kevin Franke, who got married in 2000, when Ruby was 18, and Kevin was 21. Ruby and Kevin had six children together (four daughters and two sons) and lived in Springville, Utah. The documentary does not include the first names and faces of the four children who were still under the age of 18 at the time this documentary was released. Shari Franke and Chad Franke—the two eldest children of Ruby and Kevin—were over the age of 18, estranged from Ruby and Kevin, and living in separate homes from their younger siblings when Ruby was arrested for abusing her two youngest children.

Hildebrandt’s crime story is so intertwined with Ruby’s, any documentary about Hildebrandt inevitably has to have a lot of information about Ruby. From 2015 to January 2022, Ruby documented the lives of herself, Kevin and their children on a YouTube channel that Ruby founded called 8 Passengers. At its peak, 8 Passengers had nearly 2.5 million subscribers and had six-figure sponsorship deals that totaled between $1 million to $2 million a year. Ruby presented her family as wholesome, loving and devout followers of the Mormon faith, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But behind the scenes, Ruby was an abusive tyrant, and Kevin was a passive enabler, according to Shari Franke’s 2025 memoir “The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom” and the 2025 documentary series “Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke,” which has exclusive interviews with Shari, Chad and Kevin. Ruby shut down the 8 Passengers channel in January 2022, after Ruby was the subject of intense criticism and scrutiny over her harsh parenting tactics. In one video, she admitted that she made her teenage son Chad sleep on a bean bag for seven months as punishment. In another video, Ruby filmed herself telling her then 6-year-old daughter (her youngest child) that the daughter would be deprived of lunch that day because the daughter didn’t make her own lunch.

After the demise of the 8 Passengers channel, Ruby went into business with Hildebrandt, a divorced mother whose two adult children are estranged from her. Together, Ruby and Hildebrandt started a social media platform called Moms of Truth, which promoted and advocated for strict parenting discipline that many people would describe as abusive techniques. Ruby was also actively involved in ConneXions.

The marriage of Ruby and Kevin began to fall apart soon after Ruby became more closely involved with Hildebrant in 2022. At one point, Hildebrandt moved in with Ruby and Kevin because Hildebrandt said she didn’t feel safe in her own house because Hildebrandt claimed the devil was out to get her. Hildebrandt began dictating many aspects of the couple’s life, such as ordering Kevin to sleep in a separate bedroom, while Hildebrandt began sleeping in the same bed as Ruby.

“Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” drops hints that Hildebrandt is a closeted lesbian or queer woman who had a sexual affair with Ruby, even though Hildebrandt’s teachings condemned homosexuality or queer sexuality. The documentary never mentions crucial details confirming that this sexual affair was a probable reality, which would explain why Ruby and Hildebrandt seemed to be obsessed with each other. Before their arrest on August 30, 2023, Ruby and Hildebrandt were acting like live-in partners who were co-parenting Ruby’s underage kids.

The documentary never mentions Shari Franke’s memoir, in which Shari describes an incident before Ruby banned Shari from visiting the family at the Springville house. Shari remembers seeing Hildebrandt coming out of the locked bedroom that Hildebrandt shared with Ruby and having the distinct impression that Hildebrandt and Ruby were lovers, because the bedroom was decorated like a honeymoon suite, with lit candles and massage oils. In the book, Shari describes Hildebrandt looking happy and glowing, as if she just had sex, but Hildebrandt didn’t discuss what she and Ruby were doing behind closed doors.

By June 2022, Ruby and Kevin separated, at the urging of Hildebrandt. By July 2022, Kevin had moved out of the Springville house—a change to the family that was also dictated by Hildebrandt, who had convinced Kevin that he was addicted to pornography and needed to stay away from Ruby and their children. Kevin would have no contact and would not see the children until after the August 2023 arrest of Ruby and Hildebrandt. He didn’t find out until after the arrest how badly his two youngest children had been abused.

“Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” begins with the same home video surveillance footage that almost every documentary about this scandal seems to use as the opening scene. On August 30, 2023, Franke’s then-12-year-old son rang the doorbell of a neighbor on a blistering hot day in the desert city of Ivins. The boy, who is Franke’s second-youngest child of six children, was emaciated, wearing only socks on his feet, and had duct tape tied over his wounded ankles. The boy asked to be taken to jail because he said he belonged there.

An unidentified elderly man and woman (who are presumably a couple living at the house) who answered the door are seen trying to help the boy, as the man of the house calls 911 to send an ambulance. His voice cracks with emotion when he sees the extent of the boy’s injuries. During this phone call, the boy says that he came from Jodi Hildebrandt’s house and his mother is Ruby Franke. 

Later, through Franke’s own journals, police body cam footage, witness statements and other evidence, it was revealed that Franke and Hildebrandt had been holding Franke’s two youngest children (the youngest being a 9-year-old girl at the time) captive in Hildebrandt’s sprawling compound in Ivins for several months. The children had been brainwashed to believe that they were evil and possessed by the devil and deserved any torture and punishment that they were getting from Franke and Hildebrandt. Body cam footage shows the police went to Hildebrandt’s home and found the youngest child emaciated in a locked room.

Hildebrandt and Franke were arrested that day and refused to explain in police questioning why the children were abused. Franke’s middle two children (daughters who were underage teenagers at the time) had been visiting at a friend of the family’s at the time the police searched Hildebrandt’s house. Kevin filed for divorce from Ruby in November 2023. In December 2023, Ruby and Hildebrandt pleaded guilty to aggravated child abuse of Ruby’s two youngest children. In February 2024, Ruby and Hildebrandt were each sentenced to four to 30 years in prison.

In March 2025, Kevin and Ruby’s divorce became final, after Kevin won his long legal battle of wanting full custody of their underage children, who had been placed in foster care after Ruby’s arrest and conviction. This documentary was completed before the news that Kevin Franke married his second wife Becca Bevan in November 2025. Social media postings didn’t make the wedding public until December 2025. The couple got engaged in September 2025. Social media postings of the wedding indicate that Kevin’s eldest children Shari and Chad attended the wedding and approve of this marriage.

“Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” goes back and forth between showing the police body cam footage of this investigation and going into Hildebrandt’s past. This non-chronological timeline might be a little confusing for some viewers who aren’t familiar with this true crime case. It certainly makes “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” look a bit rambling and disjointed.

On the law enforcement side, “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” has interviews with two people who’ve already been in other documentaries about the Franke/Hildebrandt child abuse case: Jessica Bate of the Santa Clara-Ivins Police Department was one of the first police detectives on the scene of the search of Hildebrandt’s house where the youngest Franke child was found. Bate also interviewed Ruby and Hildebrandt after their arrests. Eric Clarke, attorney for Utah’s Washington County, is also interviewed.

Although Bate and Clarke give emotionally effective interviews, they don’t really reveal anything new that they already haven’t talked about in other documentary interviews. Bate comments, “I’d never seen abuse on this level, in a case I’d work on before … It’s a crazy story: An individual influencing other others on how to be a good mom is detained for being a bad mom.” Clarke says in his interview: “But a therapist leading someone to religiously believe that they need to torture their children, I think that’s the more fascinating story.”

If it’s a fascinating story, it’s been told in much better documentaries than “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story,” which limits all the other interviews to people who all have reasons to say bad things about Hildebrandt. The documentary doesn’t adequately address the systemic failures that led to Hildebrandt’s abuse of power and why her disturbing history of child abuse was kept a secret until after her arrest.

Hildebrandt founded ConneXions in 2007. The documentary mentions that Hildebrandt’s therapist license was suspended for about 18 months, beginning in 2012, because she breached the confidentiality of a client by telling private information about him to a therapy group. She was still able to grow the business because she presented herself as a life coach (not as a licensed therapist) and continued to get client referrals from Mormon church officials, who knew about her suspended license. However, “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” makes no mention of trying to interview any of these Mormon church officials about why they enabled Hildebrandt and ignored complaints from her other Mormon clients.

Ethan Prete, a former ConneXions client, is given the most screen time for the documentary’s interviews, to the point where the documentary tells a lot more about his personal life than Hildebrandt’s personal life. Prete says he’s one of many people whose marriages were destroyed by Hildebrandt, who preached in her “counseling” that masturbation was a “sinful” and “deviant,” and looking at porn at least once a year equals porn addiction.

Another former ConneXions client named Valerie Jackson is interviewed. She tells a similar story to Prete’s about going to Hildebrandt for help in her troubled marriage and seeing how Hildebrandt would manipulate wives to turn against their husbands, which would lead to divorce and other marital breakups. At the time Jackson and her then-husband got involved with ConneXions in 2007, the couple had been married for three years. Jackson says Hildebrandt persuaded her married clients to stop having sex with their respective spouses: “She kept telling us, ‘You don’t need sex.'”

Jackson got divorced about a year after she and her then-husband cut ties with ConneXions. Jackson doesn’t completely blame Hildebrandt for Jackson’s divorce, but she says that Hildebrandt had “a hand” in the demise of Jackson’s marriage. Jackson describes Hildebrandt as a master manipulator who convinced many of her clients that Hildebrandt was the only person who could fix their problems through Hildebrandt’s “counseling.”

Jackson says Hildebrandt did damage to more than her personal life. She says that Hildebrandt wrecked Jackson’s finances. Jackson claims that she and her then-husband maxed out all their credit cards to pay for Hildebrandt’s services through ConneXions and were spending more on ConneXions than on their monthly mortgage payments. In total, Jackson estimates that she and her then-husband spent about $50,000 on ConneXions.

There’s no doubt that Hildebrandt is a horrible person, but there are times when some of the documentary’s bitter people who say Hildebrandt ruined their lives come across as a little whiny by not taking some responsibility for their own choices. Some of these people might feel they were conned out of their money or had their marriages ruined by Hildebrandt, but it was still their choice to give over that type of control to Hildebrandt, who was dictating to other people how to have a happy and healthy personal life, when Hildebrandt was not practicing what she was preaching.

And this is where “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” falls very short: All the documentary’s information about Hildebrandt’s personal life has already been reported elsewhere. Almost nothing is told about what type of wife and mother Hildebrandt was, which is an unacceptable lack of investigation for a documentary that’s supposed to be a biography about a convicted child abuser who built a lucrative business from family counseling before being arrested for child abuse.

The documentary mentions basic facts about Hildebrandt: She was born in Tucson, Arizona, and was one of seven children. He father (whose name is not mentioned in the documentary) was an U.S. Air Force Pilot. Her mother is not mentioned at all. As a teenager, Hildebrandt exceled in academics and basketball. In her late teens or early 20s, Hildebrandt became a Mormon missionary and did very well in this job because she had exceptional persuasion skills.

One of the people interviewed in the documentary is Laura Howells Leavitt, who lived and worked with Hildebrandt during their Mormon missionary stint, at a time in the 1990s when female missionaries were extremely rare. Howells Leavitt, who describes Hildebrandt as very charismatic and intelligent, says that she felt inadequate compared to Hildebrandt when they were companion missionaries: “Even though there were three of us [living together as missionaries], Jodi felt like she was the one who was making a difference.”

The documentary mentions that Hildebrandt got married in 1993 and had two children with her then-husband. (The names of her ex-husband and children are not mentioned in the documentary.) The marriage ended in divorce in 1996. No one in the documentary gives the reason for the divorce. The documentary also has no information on how long Hildebrandt has been estranged from her children, who are now adults.

Hildebrandt’s former client Jackson says that Hildebrant once mentioned during a group therapy session that Hildebrandt’s family members despised Hildebrandt and didn’t want to be around her. At the time, Jackson thought it was strange that Hildebrandt would make this confession to clients when Hildebrandt had marketed herself as an expert in happy and healthy family relationships. In hindsight, Jackson understands this confession for being a crack in Hildebrandt’s carefully crafted façade and a glimpse into the troubled personal life of Hildebrandt.

But what about that personal life? Don’t expect this documentary to have any information about who were Hildebrandt’s friends and lovers after her divorce. There are no details about whom Hildebrandt was close to, except for the widely known facts about her close relationship with Ruby.

In 2010, before Hildebrandt was estranged from her entire family, her married brother ordered his then-16-year-old child Jessi Hildebrandt (whose current pronouns are “they/them”) to live with Jodi because Jessi had come out as queer and had some rebellion issues, such as skipping school. Jessi, who is seen in a video conference call interview in the documentary, has given multiple interviews in other documentaries and news reports where Jessi talks about the abuse that Jodi inflicted on Jessi in the several months that Jessi lived with Jodi.

This abuse included Jessi being locked in rooms, being forced to sleep in the snow, and getting frequent beatings from Jodi. Jessi says that Jessi reported this abuse to police, but nothing happened because Jessi had no proof, and Jodi was considered an upstanding member of the community. Jessi says that Jodi tried to convince Jessi that Jessi was possessed by the devil.

In the documentary, Jessi says about Jodi: “She wanted to make my life so uncomfortable that it would force the sin out of me. I would confess to things I didn’t do as a way of trying to get the abuse to stop.” Jessi describes Jodi as being very fixated on equating homosexuality with sin and deviancy.

Christi Judd, who was a neighbor of Jodi’s at the time Jessi lived with Jodi, remembers how Jessi canceled plans to spend friend time with Judd’s son, who is about the same age as Jessi. Judd says that Jessi seemed to be a recluse who disappeared into the house. Judd gets tearful when she thinks about how she now knows that Jessi was an abused captive, but Judd didn’t know and didn’t suspect it at the time because Jodi seemed to be so “normal.”

The only clue that the documentary offers about why Jodi has major hangups about sexuality is by mentioning something that Jodi wrote in her self-help book “You Are Not Not Enough,” which she self-published in 2010. Kathy Klinghorn, a clinical social worker who worked with Jodi for a period of time that the documentary does not detail, reads aloud an except from the book where Jodi says that when Jodi was 7 years old, unnamed teenage boys began sexually abusing her. That’s all the documentary mentions about this alleged abuse.

Natasha Helfer, a former Mormon who is a licensed therapist, is also interviewed. Helfer has been interviewed in other documentaries and news reports about the Hildebrandt/Franke child abuse scandal. Helfer’s only connection to Hildebrandt is that Helfer says many of Helfer’s clients are former clients of Hildebrandt. Helfer has nothing new to add that she hasn’t already talked about before in interviews that she did elsewhere.

“Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” looks like a hastily assembled documentary that cobbles together a lot of widely used archival footage with interviews that reveal no new information. There are decades of Hildebrandt’s personal life that are not investigated and remain a mystery in this slipshod documentary. Instead, “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” has the usual clichés of a “bandwagon jumping” true crime documentary: tacky ominous music, a limited range of interviews, and a jumbled narrative that copies information that other documentaries have already covered.

Netflix premiered “Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story” on December 30, 2025.